children

Patterns of child-rearing

Specialist paediatrician Neil
McKerrow reviews how adults have historically understood
children and their upbringing.

Thomas Carlyle correctly noted “The history of the
world is but the biography of great men”. The ordinary man is seldom
featured in the pages of history, and the child virtually never.

History is the record of public, not private, events
and the “crowds and crowds of little children are strangely absent from
the written record”. The net result of this fact is a noticeable absence
of detail about childrearing practices of the past. The pattern of
childrearing provides the basis for adult personality and therefore has
a vital influence on public events and world history, yet very little is
known about it. No-one really knows whether childrearing depends on
cultural traits or vice-versa. Recent research has begun to shed some
light on conditions of childhood through the ages. Anna Burr, in her
1909 review of 250 autobiographies, noted that not one contained happy
memories of childhood, whilst Valentine, reading letters covering a
600-year period, was unable to find a father who wasn’t insensitive,
moralistic and self-centered. A summary of this and other research shows
that the further back into history one goes, the lower the level of
child care and the more likely children were to be killed, abandoned,
beaten, terrorized and sexually abused.

Alternately, with the passage of time childrearing
practices and the quality of childhood have shown a sustained
improvement. This begs the question “Why?" It has been suggested that
the major force for change in parent-child relations is not technology
or economics but rather the psychogenic changes in personality occurring
because of successive generations of parent-child interactions. This “psychogenic theory of history” proposes that when parenting, each
successive generation of adults regresses to the psychic age of their
children and in parenting they re-experience childhood. Having already
experienced their own childhood, this second encounter is more
successful with fewer anxieties and improved parenting. The net result
is that each generation improves on the preceding one. This pressure for
change results from spontaneous regressing, independent of social and
technological change.

Parent-child reactions
If we accept this theory, then in viewing childhood over generations it
is important to look at factors which may influence the psyche of the
next generation. That is, what happens when an adult is faced with a
dependent child. There are three possible reactions:

Projective

Reversal

Empathic

1. The projective reaction.
Here the child is used by the adult as a vehicle for the projection of
the contents of his own unconscious. This results in the child being
seen as part of the parent, reflecting their unacceptable subconscious
thoughts, emotions and beliefs. Because these subconscious feelings, and
by projection the child, are unacceptable to the parent the child is
seen as something evil which needs to be disposed of or controlled. This
led to practices such as infanticide and abandonment and later to
various actions aimed at suppressing the evil within the child.
Initially these took a physical form such as the swaddling of babies,
leading strings to restrain infants, and severe beatings for older
children. Physical restraint was often accompanied and later replaced by
mental restraints achieved through terrorising children with stories of
ghost-like figures, corpses and witches.

Projective reactions are well illustrated by two
common phenomena of the past. The extreme beatings commonly given to
children and the frequency of severe and fatal accidents involving
children. Beatings were an easy way of controlling the evil in the child
and because the parent viewed himself and the child as the same person,
when the child was being beaten the parent was actually beating himself
and therefore felt no guilt. Hence the frequency and severity of the
beatings for relatively trivial offences. Similarly because the parent
sees the child as so full of portions of himself, accidents to the child
are seen as injuries to the parent. “Alas, for my sins the just God
throws my child into the fire.” Once again it is the parent who is being
punished for some presumed offence or oversight, not the child, so there
is no feeling of guilt for the child's hurt and no steps are deemed
necessary to prevent further accidents. The mortality from accidents was
high and the type of accident repetitive, with drownings and burns being
particularly common.

2. The reversal reaction.
In this interaction the roles of adult and child become reversed. The
child is used by the adult as a substitute for an adult figure who was
important in his own childhood. Here the child exists to satisfy
parental needs and is seen as a source of love, protection and
nourishment. This view of children as parents paves the way for a
variety of excesses in which the child is misused to fulfill the needs “physical emotional, sexual and economic “of the parent. Foremost
amongst these excesses are sexual misuse and child labour. An additional
and interesting consequence of this interaction was infant deaths
following "overlaying". Here the parent was unable to part from the
child so the two slept together with the parent clutching the child like
a security blanket, eventually smothering him. More recently the failure
of the child to fulfill this parental role often triggers child abuse.
As one abusing parent has commented, “I have never felt loved all my
life. When the baby was born I thought he would love me. When he cried
it meant he didn’t love me. So I hit him”.

Projective and reversal reactions often occurred
simultaneously in parents of the past, producing an effective double
image where the child is seen as both full of the adult’s unacceptable
projected needs and desires, and at the same time as a mother or father
figure. That is, the child is both bad and loving.

3. The empathic reaction
reflects a more recent interaction in which the adult empathises with
the child. Basically this means that the adult is able to regress to the
level of a child's need, correctly identify it and without imposing
adult projections, satisfy it.

Both the projective and the reversal reactions are
adult-centered with the child existing as either an extension of the
adult or to provide for the needs of the adult. In contrast the empathic
reaction shifts the focus of attention from the adult to the child.
Children of the past were most commonly subject to the projective
reaction where they were seen as evil or a combination of projective and
reversal reactions where they were both bad and loving. It is only
recently, in historical terms, that the empathic reaction has played a
significant role in parent-child relations. The first two reactions do
not indicate lack of love for their children by historical parents but
rather an inability to accept the child as an individual separate from
themselves. Children were viewed as bad and loving, hated and loved;
rewarded and punished.

Modes of parenting have evolved from practices
dominated by projective reactions, through reversal reactions to the
most recent modes encompassing empathic reactions. Whilst these forms of
parent-child reactions form the basis for each mode of child rearing
they have been influenced to a varying degree by a number of external
factors. The two most significant factors being

firstly, the acceptance that a child, like an
adult, possesses a soul and

secondly, recognition that the child is an
individual in his own right and not merely an extension of an adult.

The above interactions between adult and child have,
singly or in combination, evolved over time to produce six modes of
childrearing practices. It is difficult to place these modes into a time
sequence as rates of evolution vary from society to society and show
class and regional differences. Therefore any mode may have prevailed at
a time, though periods can be recognised during which each mode was the
dominant pattern of childrearing.

Modes of childrearing1. The infanticidal mode. This mode,
characterized by both projective and reversal reactions, dominated the
period from antiquity to the fourth century A.D. As a consequence of
projective reactions children were perceived as representative of evil
and as such had to be controlled. The easiest way to do this was to
remove the source of evil permanently by killing the child. It is well
known that infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was
a regular practice of antiquity. The killing of legitimate children
slowly reduced during the Middle ages, and illegitimate children
continued to be killed up into the nineteenth century. Until the fourth
century neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong; indeed
Grecian and Roman scholars promoted the practice as a means for coping
with abnormal or excessive children. It was only in 374 A.D. that the
law and the Church first began to consider the killing of an infant to
be murder. Prior to this it was justified in the belief that a child had
no soul. Despite the changed attitude, parents in the Middle Ages were
seldom punished for practising infanticide.

Illegitimate children were killed routinely, girls
frequently, the third or later boy invariably, and abnormal children
always. Child sacrifice was common in the years B.C. and drowning,
starving or exposure of unwanted babies, the practice in the years A.D.
Although infanticide was the dominant mode of child-rearing up to the
fourth century it persisted in various forms well into the nineteenth
century. One good example was the central European practice of sealing
infants in the walls or foundations of buildings and bridges to
strengthen the structure. This persisted as late as the mid 1800's.

The presence of the reversal reaction during this
period is evident in the extreme sexual abuse of all children from
infancy to adolescence.

2. The abandonment mode.
This mode stretched from the fourth to the thirteenth century and was
also dominated by both projective and reversal reactions, although the
latter reaction diminished considerably towards the end of the period.
Once parents accepted that children had souls it was no longer possible
to escape the evil projections they represented by killing them. The
solution was to distance themselves from these dangerous projections by
abandoning their children. This was done in a variety of ways. Children
were sold into slavery, sent to a wet nurse, the monastery or convent,
to foster families, to the homes of nobles as servants or hostages or by
extreme emotional abandonment at home. Severe beatings and child labour
were very common but with the reduction in reversal reactions sexual
abuse became a little less widespread.

The sale of children was the first form of abandonment to be tackled
when, in the seventh century, the Church ruled that a man could not sell
his son into slavery after the age of seven. It is known that well into
the twelfth century the English were selling their children to the Irish
as slaves. Elsewhere child sale continued sporadically into modern times
and was only outlawed in Russia in the last century.

The use of children as political hostages and
security for debts was common in the middle ages, even though invariably
unsuccessful.

The fostering of children persisted into the 1600's
whereby children were sent to other families to be reared. They stayed
there until the age of 17 and in return for their keep worked for the
foster family. This was common in all classes and was equivalent to an
apprenticeship or the practice in the upper classes of sending children
to monasteries nunneries or to act as clerks or ladies-in-waiting. Many
historians feel this represented a form of kindness “the parents being
unwilling to make their own children work within the home.

Up until the eighteenth century the average child of
wealthy parents spent his first three to five years with a wet nurse,
returned to the care of other servants until being sent out to service,
apprenticeship or school by the age of seven. The amount of contact
between parent and child was minimal. Justifications for these practices
have included: to teach the child to speak; to cure timidness; to
improve the child's health; as payment of debts; or simply because the
child was unwanted.

3. The ambivalent mode.
Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries both projective and
reversal reactions persisted but to lessening degrees. As the empathic
reaction emerged conflict arose leading to an ambivalence towards
children. The child was still seen as a container of dangerous
projections but, as long as he was restrained, was allowed near his
parents resulting in improved physical contact and the beginnings of
positive emotional responses towards the child. The role of the parents
was to accept responsibility for their children and to physically mould
each child into shape.

This was achieved through physical beatings and
various restraints. In infancy swaddling was essential to protect the
infant from the dangerous adult projections within him. If left
unswaddled infants were supposedly at risk of blinding themselves,
tearing off their ears, scratching themselves, breaking limbs or
crawling about on all fours like an animal. Swaddling consisted of
depriving the infant of total use of his limbs by enveloping them in an
endless length of bandage and compressing the trunk and head to whatever
shape one desired. It took about two hours to apply and resulted in
excoriated skin, pressure sores, brachycardia, lethargy and drowsiness.
A swaddled infant was extremely passive and undemanding. This favoured
the child-minders who could leave their infants, like a parcel, in any
convenient corner. Total swaddling continued for about four months at
which stage the arms were left free whilst the legs and trunk remained
swaddled for a further six to nine months.

Once swaddling was discontinued children were
controlled by beatings, by being tied to furniture, by the use of
leading strings and other such devices. It is interesting to note that
in 70 biographies of children who lived before the seventeenth century
all were subject to severe beatings. One last practice common during
this and earlier periods was that of giving children enemas. Children
have apparently always been identified with their excrement. In French
newborns are called ecreme, and merdeux (or “little
child") is derived from the Latin merde, excrement. It was
common belief during this period that the inner state of the child could
be determined by examining his urine and faeces. Consequently purges,
suppositories and enemas were the rule of the day. The fact that the
child's faeces looked and smelled unpleasant supported the belief that
the child was possessed of an inner demon which spoke to the adult world
insolently, threateningly and with malice.

4. The intrusive mode. The
eighteenth century saw the disappearance of reversal reactions, a
reduction in projection and the emergence of empathic reactions. This
accompanied major changes in parent-child relations. The child was no
longer seen as being full of dangerous projections and was therefore so
much less threatening to the parents that true empathy was possible.
Parents became more involved in their children's upbringing and rather
than physically controlling the child tried to conquer their minds,
thereby controlling the child's insides, his anger, his needs and his
will. Children raised by intrusive parents were nursed by the mother,
not swaddled, given fewer enemas. They were toilet trained but neiter
played with nor beaten. They were made to obey promptly with threats,
guilt and other punishments such as being shut up in dark closets for
hours.

This period saw a decline in the universal practice
of giving enemas and with the decline in projective reactions true
toilet training became increasingly more important.

As empathic reactions emerged, paediatrics was born
and child rearing manuals, which first appeared in the previous period,
became increasingly common. The general trend was towards improved child
care and reduced infant mortality.

5. The socialising mode.
Since the nineteenth century this mode, reflecting an empathic reaction
between parent and child, has dominated. With the shift from projective
to empathic reactions, child-rearing became less a matter of conquering
the child and more a process of training the child, guiding him into the
right direction and socialising him. This mode is thought by many as the
only mode within which discussions of child care can proceed and it is
the source of all psychological modes from Freud's channelling of
impulses to Skinner’s behaviourism.

Of note is that it is during this period that the
father at last began to participate positively in child rearing.

6. The helping mode. Since
the mid twentieth century this mode, in which the empathic reaction is
taken to the extreme, has began to emerge. This mode proposes that the
child knows better than the parent what his needs are at each stage of
his development. Parent and child supposedly empathise and work together
to fulfil these needs. Discipline is unnecessary as the parent functions
as the child's servant, playing with him, tolerating regressions,
interpreting emotional conflicts and providing objects specific to his
evolving interests. This involves an enormous amount of time, energy and
patience from the parent and few parents have tried it. The result is
reportedly a gentle, sincere, independent child with a strong will and
little fear of authority.

The overall pattern in the evolution of childrearing
has been from protecting the parent from the evil embodied in the child
to protecting the child and preparing him for adult life. This has
entailed a shift from infanticide to abandonment, then physical and
mental restraint to reach a point of support and protection.

Many of these modes of childrearing are to be found
in such a diverse country as this with no clear definition as to what
determines which mode will dominate in a particular community. Similar
modes occur within different social groups whilst different modes are
found within a single culture. Improved communications have brought the
problems of the world into individual households, and this assisted by
violence, cultural and social breakdown, economic ills, poverty and a
health crisis are sufficiently disruptive to undermine the general trend
towards improved childhood. As a result, we are experiencing increasing
abuse, neglect and abandonment of our children. Although these problems
are minor in comparison to those of the past, it is important to take
note of Peter Townsend's comment that “since the beginning of recorded
history down to the present day the harm that men do to children has not
changed.” It is even more important to realise that “children are not a
pressure group; they seldom get a chance to speak and when they do they
are not often heard.” It is therefore up to us not only to care for
these children but to act as their advocates, seeking recognition of
their rights and the fulfillment of their needs.

References

Carlyle, T, The Hero as Divinity, in Heroes and
Hero-worship.

Laslett P. The World We Have Lost. New York,
1965.

Burr A R, The Autobiography: A Critical and
Comparative Study. Boston, 1909.